Telling social media about your divorce

On behalf of Graff & Associates, LLC posted in Divorce on Saturday, October 20, 2018.

In a world where we know more about the people we don’t see than the people we do, it almost seems logical to share about your divorce on social media. After all, that’s where all of your closest friends from high school and college are, right?

While your best friends may care very deeply for what you are going through, when you are still in the process of getting a divorce (and sometimes even after it is finalized), sharing on social media can be a bad idea.

Here’s what you should think about before posting about your divorce on social media.

Social media is forever

It seems like you would be able to simply “delete” a potentially regretful post so that it is gone forever, right? Unfortunately, the moment you send it out, the time to reconsider is over. While you may be able to delete it from your account, there are any number of ways the post could live on.

Once the post is live, it exists on the servers of whatever platform you used. That means that even after you have taken it off of your wall, it still exists and could potentially be discoverable in your divorce case. Also, once it has gone live, someone could take a screen shot of the post. Once this happens, you no longer have control of who has the post or what they do with it.

Unwanted opinions

Getting to the point where you want a divorce is difficult enough. You may even have consulted some close friends and family members as you considered what to do and how to move forward.

This still is not the time to put all of that information on social media. Talking discreetly to close friends and family about your divorce, including your entire social network is another. Adding extra opinions to a decision that was already difficult can make the situation much worse. Before you know it, you will be caught in debates about why you are even considering divorce in the first place. Then, ultimately, these debates will exist on social media forever.

When to post

The bottom line is that you don’t want to have a lot of details about your divorce on social media that could potentially make your life far more difficult. Between the extra opinions and the material that could be used against you, it simply is not worth it.

If you feel like you must post something, consider waiting until everything has been finalized, and only then, make it a brief mention. There is no need to go into detail about all of the reasons you got a divorce or how long you struggled to make it work. If close friends want more information, consider talking to those friends privately so that you don’t have incriminating information on your social media page.

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